


"The Lionheart's Sister's Death"

by Lady_Plantagenet



Category: 12th Century CE RPF, King John - Shakespeare, The Lion in Winter (1968)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Imprisonment, POV Third Person Limited, Purple Prose, Sacrifice, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Love, Song fic, This was a challenge, This was a fic request, as per usual, lionheart, mainly present tense, written in a mix of tenses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29964918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Plantagenet/pseuds/Lady_Plantagenet
Summary: In 1192 Richard I "Lionheart" King of England is not the only one of the Angevins imprisoned by Leopold V Duke of Austria on the way back from the Third Crusades. A fourth sister: Marilena, Dowager Queen of Portugal though non-existent in history is here with him and while the ransom raised may not be enough to regain him his freedom - perhaps her sacrifice is.
Relationships: Richard I of England & Original Female Character
Comments: 7
Kudos: 9





	"The Lionheart's Sister's Death"

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pendragonalice73](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pendragonalice73/gifts).



> Disclaimer: Apologies for any historical inaccuracies as I am not very well versed in this era. Also this work is not to be taken as a representing my views on the Crusades, I am not much for glorifying them personally.
> 
> The verses in this fic are taken from the song Richard I historically wrote during his captivity - it is called “Ja Nus Hons Pris” (he had also made an Occitian version of these lyrics). It is quite a lovely song.

_ “What marvel that my heart is sad and sore _

_ When my own lord torments my helpless lands! _

_ Well do I know that, if he held his hands,” _

The Duke of Austria had a castle at Dürnstein and it held fast - at Chignon admist straggling rivers of blue winding about one another as they did the hills they slithered through, there, it was a life past as a childhood. Through a window highly arched Marilena’s eyes wander wherever her spirits deign - but she likes the waters best and so there her focuses claimed. But she is one and thirty now and grimaces.  F _rom the devil we came to the devil we return._ This jest had left her brother with threefold more that follow from his lips with every day that passed them. 

_  
“What marvel that my heart is sad and sore _

_ When my own lord torments my helpless lands! _

_ Well do I know that, if he held his hands,” _

_ When Melusine had slipped through the stones of Lusignan she was still a faye; remained sweet as a melody risen from a pond. The demon Countess of Anjou had been haggarder, older.  _ Marilena imagined that when she had broken through the glass in her escape she had emerged red as the prelate’s cloaks, with shards stained and winking in all the colours that had crept through the windows of mass; trailing after her and until she fell away with a shriek. 

_ “The ancient proverb now I know for sure; _

_ Death and a prison know nor kind nor tie, _

_ Since for mere lack of gold they let me lie.” _

With an upturn in her heart she muses on how the Duke did not need a moat - the Danube did good work of that. Her brother’s voice twinges with a string. 

‘That last verse you sing over and over me. I now see why’ Marilena sighs ‘it does not bode well with the rest of the tune’

Richard drops his lute with a carelessness that made the rushes shudder - they could break no fall for they had been stale since last month and so they snap around the wood. ‘You are wrong  _ Marie _it is my saddest work’

‘It is also plainly wrong - they want our marks not our Gold’ she shifts her veil and it slides over her wimple and small face. The sun was unusually bright today. ‘Not to mention this talk of gold makes such a tune too wordly’  _Pour toujours n_ _otre mere_ she can hear him think to himself as he smiles a little -  _ Aquitaine’s courtly daughter . _

‘Silver is ugly’ he pulls a face crossing his hands ‘too ugly for a ballad’. Truly! he changed with each passing day .

‘And so is our land, this England we yearn to get to’ _Quant mes sires met ma terre en torment_ she sings their favourite line back to him, it made the movements of his face that much grimmer and terse; the fieriness of his beard flashing among the yellow enveloping them from the walls. His mouth moves for a while while silently he struggles for words.  _Richard Oc-e-Non_ as he was called at Poitiers - where their mother’s patrimonies saw them raised as her children. A poetic leader was for the English a terse malcontent child too eager for sparring to the Aquitainians.

Marilena straightens the crease in her gown to pass that silence. She notices it is too sprightly a blue to suit the gold of her girdle and time was evading them - them both and fast. She checks and sees her wrists had smalled just as she suspected they would.

* * *

Two weeks have now passed and the Duke visits them in their rounded turret. He has boring eyes just as the King of France’s from their mother’s stories. It sits odd with the rest of a face waving with a malice that brother and sister knew dreamt them over and over , and the satisfaction he imagines he would find in striking at them. Flesh for the cloth of a banner was how Leopold of Austria rated justice, how fiefs balanced their petty mercies.

Sancho I had left her a widow and the Angevin force without Portugal’s might in this Third Crusade. Had she not birthed him Pedro and with him reawakened all the zeal that her husband had when they held Almohad and were still King and Queen of Silves - those hot eastern lands that languished before her eyes with the fever and enclosure. She does not imagine she would ever see a summer as hot again in Europe but having pulled the last remnants of her will into a sword, forged hot and angry by Lionheart’s strength she had led her son’s people as their queen mother until all the sand cooled beneath their blood. 

While Leopold drawls on, imprinting into them the terms on which they would sell their country by, they looked at each other - auburn on auburn, blue eyes blazed with anticipation and worry. They would be free, no longer would the plain land to the north tie them to it like a nagging cur.

‘45,359 in silver is 150,000 in marks’ Leopold says again ‘ Richard looks up and she does too. 

‘I have pledged you my niece - Brittany’s maid to your heir already‘ Richard’s voice booms ‘my more fearsome and true ally of Lecce - Tancred I have also been forced to betray for your Emperor. I pray your lord has eyes to reward you for being the obedient vassal that you are. But no more you may demand of me’

‘No more?’ a lightness slithers into Leopold’s tone ‘I restate what was arranged - for your release. Your England could but raise 35,000. For daughter of Geoffrey, Tancred of Lecce comes the 10,000 or so of Silver’

‘The Mortgage of England!’

‘Not that you would so care’ Leopold says in the quaff of a laugh ‘Nor would my lord care to go there himself, as his imperial gaze looks east’

_ But how pleasingly south he’d look for our Aquitaine _ Marilena thinks sadly.

Alas, Leopold’s ire that returned with him early from the late crusade directed nowhere but up. Had his colours not been struck by her brother she would have had them torn herself.  _Red_ , she thinks again, the scene searing back into her mind, welcomed to her headache. Jerusalem - a better place to have left one’s passions and fury then this stone pile. She longs that god may make her grave her choosing but she shares her family’s misgivings.

She does not hear the further talk ‘One’ Leopold tells them clearly enough to bring her from her thoughts’ embrace ‘one ransom for one person. That is all that is paid’ and Richard looks like to burn. 

* * *

Marilena knew he favours her above all their brothers and sisters. Chose only her to accompany him east not only for her spleen but also his heart, but now she understands the wound at the back of her shoulder and what it will come to mean. The week she had been allowed to a bath she spied herself in a polished shield only to find the skin around it had grown green and flecks of yellow began to muster around the gape and the harder it grew to wash, the harder moving her arm had become.

Now she slips her yellow cape over her shoulder and then the green arm of her dress off. This was easily done when older dresses did not shrink with their mistresses. In the dazzle of the day reflecting from the Danuble blue, he is able to see it clear enough to gasp so heartily that she knows she could not bear to face him; to peer into her mirror’s face twisted in anguish to her would have only added another disappointment wringing over her last year. She was thirty but he was not much older.

His hands close around the hilt of his dagger as though he means to shuck it off her back himself ‘so this is what the cough and shiver was, I could swear hand on heart that-

‘- that my girlhood nervousnesses had returned?’ she smiles gently placing her free hand over his heart. He was a solider not a surgeon. 

And a brother who had shared in her bouts of hiccuping and shaking during their bouts of panic when they were younger and less travelled.

‘I- would’ she starts ‘be left here  _ in lieu  _ of you. May Joanna look over my son should you crusade again, or have John watch over him from England should Portugal prove indisposed to a king babe as their lord. Eleanor shall perhaps unite the Iberian with a daughter of hers should she fail bring Spain forth a son. She ought to then marry Berengaria to my Alfonso. Also, Joanna instead of me for Salladin’s bride-‘

He backs over and her heart breaks like his proud face does in between sobs. _I would not die remembering you like this, not as I would wish_.  Marilena knew It would be difficult enough in a moon’s time when he would be long gone by England and she would sit in the light with her translucent eyes closed and pretend it was the sun and the stones of Edressa burning under her, shuffle alone in her sheets fancying it was her vassals’ hoofs she heard clattering after her not her own life’s blood beating into her ear. 

It was difficult, when at Poitier, her mother with Chrétien de Troyes in hand had her imagine Arthur weeping. Their father never wept and when he did there was never a nobility to it. Richard’s beard is now wet as the rest of his face stayed buried behind his hands and she now understood what it was for a King to weep. _He shall be crowned again, no more gloriest sight shall my eyes find wove below the heavens_. Paradise is where she was sure she would be. All crusaders dead by the saracen’s blade or culled by the journey would float past purgatory. This, the pope had promised Europe and it was the sail from the Adriatic back from the Third Crusade that had found them immured here. Surely this fell within god’s directive for those who had reached for the holy land and failed. She wishes she could ask John to interpret it as he did his laws, at the very least it would amuse her, maybe Richard would. 

‘I would feign lay down my sister’s life for all of England’ he succours at her gown and her gold partlet digs into her forehead as she feels her throat constrict. She tries to speak - ‘I know you would. But for Jerusalem as well?’

She sinks below, prying his hands away from his face ‘for if you would - that would no true Christian King make’ she says trying to stop her eyes from glazing with each word.

_ ‘ _ _Marie’_ he slurs his Occitian accent with difficulty ‘you take leave of the world like this and so the Angevin Empire goes with you. Mirror of my shield, sister to our sword and spirit of our mother... the hand that had added the other glorious stroke to the cross of St George. Victim or villain against those treacherous to me - as you take leave of the world so I go with you’

Marilena looks at him, and hears his bellow remain strong through tears. Her glory notwithstanding, she knows her sex. It is for her to wax wane and for him to fight as she knows he will - she smiles sadly and picks up his lute from where it had lain for three weeks. With a brush of the dust she begins - 

_ “Remembering the common oath we swore, _

_ I should not here imprisoned with my song,  
— _

_ Remain a prisoner long.” _

* * *

After Richard took her leave off her he would add as his seventh verse-

_ “ Countess sister! Your sovereign fame _

_ May he preserve whose help I claim,  
— _

_ Victim for whom am I!” _

Marilena had convinced him not to and stayed him to her plea during their prisoner months. But now with his want to disgrace the sister that had forsaken him overpowering as it did the memories of his _Lenée_ and over anything that she may have said - he rechristenised her into his mind’s eye - making of her a testament before she had even died. The one who was truly _ Marie _ had forsaken him. She had always been Geoffrey’s sister rather than his, it seemed to Richard that even brotherhood had degrees.

And while months later still at Dürnstein, she lay stirring with the ache of fever, at peace and drawing her last breaths surrounded by a litany of ladies who knew naught but German - Lionheart would be pierced by an arrow during the siege of Châlus-Chabrol. And upon seeing his wound he instantly knew what befell him.

**Author's Note:**

> So uhm.. I don't quite know what I have written but I do like my challenges. This was a challenge as I did not know the period well and had been given only two days to write it. Also I experimented with the whole tense change and it was fun but it might also have confused some of you and I am sorry for that haha. Hope person who requested this enjoys it and it entertains the rest of you. 
> 
> Please review if you please as it means a lot to me - whatever you have to say is welcome regardless of it is criticism or not.


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